Far-right authoritarian pundits and political actors, from Matt Walsh to Elon Musk, all seem to have gotten the same memo instructing them to fixate on “low” fertility and birth rates. Musk has claimed that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming” and that it will lead to “mass extinction.”
Some liberals are flirting with this narrative, too. In a February New Yorker essay, Gideon Lewis-Kraus deploys dystopian imagery to describe the “low” birth-rate in South Korea, twice comparing the country to the collapsing, childless society in the 2006 film Children of Men.
It’s not just liberals and authoritarians engaging in this birth-rate crisis panic. Self-described leftist Elizabeth Bruenig recently equated falling fertility with humanity’s inability “to persist on this Earth.” Running through her pronatalist Atlantic opinion piece is an entirely uninterrogated presumption that fertility rates collected today are able to predict the total disappearance of the species Homo sapiens at some future time.
But is this panic about low fertility driving human population collapse supported by any evidence?
You know economics is about resources and there isn’t some magical system that gets around resource distribution, right?
Economics has been termed the dismal science for a reason. A permanent solution to the demographic problems of people living longer will either involve people accepting a lower living standard than they otherwise could have or having people work longer before retiring. Or maybe Logan’s Run? It doesn’t matter if it’s a capitalist society or a socialist society the problems are the same, large population not producing anything but still consuming resources.
But chill, as a great economist once said, in the long run we’re all dead anyway. There’s still a massive pool of people that want to live in our ever-growing populations. We just gotta stop letting people make us think immigration is a bad thing. It’ll be a long time before the entire world is living at the same standard of living we enjoy in the developed world, and with so many people getting suckered into making their countries backwards and authoritarian (thanks, Putin!) it doesn’t look like we’re going to run out of immigrants that will be willing to move to an affluent democracy any time in our lifetimes.
If we get to a point where we can no longer depend on attracting immigrants because every country in the world is an affluent democracy… well that’s a good problem to have, isn’t it?